


Fire, Fire

by sinestrated



Category: Bleach
Genre: Established Relationship, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-25
Updated: 2018-10-25
Packaged: 2019-08-07 06:41:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16403258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinestrated/pseuds/sinestrated
Summary: Byakuya reminisces on the first time he met Renji, long before the Academy.





	Fire, Fire

The boy’s spirit finally manifests after what feels like an eternity of waiting. Byakuya should probably complain about being relegated to such a mundane task, but he’s only been in the Thirteenth for two months. If he goes around whining now, people will only see the spoiled young noble’s son. Despite Ukitake’s infuriatingly calm smiles, he respects his captain and won’t bring such dishonor to the division.

All around them the houses continue to smolder. The fires have been mostly put out, the survivors already carted off on makeshift stretchers of blankets and bamboo. Now only the dead are left, and the shinigami among them, quietly doing their work.

The boy floats up from a pile of charred, smoking debris. The corpse underneath is already burnt beyond recognition, but the spirit is intact, sitting atop the pile with his elbows balanced on his knees as if he is merely watching one of the lavish processions the feudal lord here is so fond of. He’s probably eight or nine but looks much younger, malnutrition slimming his body and stunting his bones, and his hair is the brightest red Byakuya has ever seen, like a firework in the gloom of the lingering smoke.

Senbonzakura is already in his hand, but he doesn’t make a move as the boy looks around, blinking big eyes at the destruction surrounding them, at the other shinigami of the Thirteenth who are sending other ghosts on their way. At last, brown eyes look up to settle on him. The boy blinks and his gaze travels down and then up, a steady, almost bored evaluation, taking in all of Byakuya: his uniform, his zanpakutou, his black hair tied back in a loose ponytail. “Mister…”

Byakuya waits for it. He’s heard it enough times already:  _ Am I dead? Is this the afterlife?  _

Then the boy lifts an arm to scratch his neck. The movement causes his raggedy, torn sleeve to fall back, and Byakuya sees the bruises on a delicate wrist, just-formed and deep red and distinctly, terribly finger-shaped. There are cuts along the base of the boy’s neck, thin scars running further down his chest to disappear beneath his shirt. They did not come from the fire.

The boy’s eyes harden into flint, enough, Byakuya thinks, to strike a first spark. “Did I kill him at least?”

The owner of this house, bigger and more lavish than the others, is a foreigner. Byakuya remembers the striking lightness of the man’s hair, how he’d moaned and thrashed as he was pulled from the wreckage, half his body burnt and blistering. They took him away, and because his skin is fair and his eyes are blue, he’ll be looked after. He’ll be taken back to whatever faraway land he came from and treated with the best of modern medicine, and he’ll live, and his hands will continue leaving greedy bruises on small, helpless bodies.

He lifts Senbonzakura’s hilt. The boy looks up at him, no hint of fear, and for a moment, just a moment, Byakuya wants the entire world to burn.

“Yes,” he answers, and has just enough time to see the vicious satisfaction in the boy’s smile before he stamps Senbonzakura down onto a small forehead and the spirit disappears.

#

Byakuya came out of sleep with a soft breath and a slow opening of his eyes, the last vestiges of the dream—memory?—slipping from him like a forgotten lover’s touch. It was sometime just before dawn, the sky outside still mostly dark, complete silence in his bedchamber except for the stubborn echoes outside of a last few crickets fighting sleep.

The room was warm and the futon soft. He shifted, then paused at the familiar weight of an arm around his waist. Even in the dim half-light, he recognized the corded muscle, the smattering of scars and, of course, the dark, jagged tattoos.

Taking a breath, he turned slowly, mindful of his movements. Renji didn’t wake, slumped on his side with his head pillowed on one arm, long red hair falling in a loose braid over his shoulder. His face was completely smooth in slumber, not a hint of anger or stress. No nightmares tonight, thank the gods.

As happened almost every morning when he woke before Renji, Byakuya took a moment to just watch his partner, allowing that flicker of awe that never extinguished at the realization that, against all odds and the expectations of his clan and Soul Society as a whole, he’d managed to bring someone so extraordinary into his life. Other people looked at them and thought Renji was the lucky one, the penniless, no-name peasant from Inuzuri who’d fought his way tooth-and-nail up through society and somehow sunk his teeth into Byakuya in a vulnerable moment. But they would be wrong. It was Byakuya who had been fighting, beating his fists against a thick, icy prison made of aristocracy and wealth and suffocating expectations. He’d wanted Renji to break down his walls. He’d wanted to be free. 

And now they were here. Despite the judgments of society and whispers through the Gotei and a truly spectacular attempted coup within the Kuchiki clan, he and Renji had made it to this point together, slightly singed, perhaps, but intact. Byakuya would never return to the cage, and he knew, with the assuredness of a planet orbiting an unwavering star, that Renji would fight and sacrifice all of himself to ensure that never happened.

They were happy. For the first time in a very long time,  _ he _ was happy. And now, looking down at Renji as he slept, the memory of smoke and ashes and defiant brown eyes lingering in his mind, Byakuya swallowed and wondered if he deserved it.

The room grew suddenly cold. He shivered, pulled his yukata tighter around his shoulders, and rose slowly from the bed. Renji still didn’t stir, and Byakuya made sure to open and close the bedroom door as quickly as possible so as not to let in any of the cold morning air. Small things like this, not being disturbed or roused too early without a need, were indulgences he knew Renji didn’t have nearly enough of.

The rest of the estate had not yet awoken, the only sounds the soft babbling of the river and the rustle of a morning breeze through the sakura trees. Byakuya stood on the low bridge near his private rooms, peering down at the rushing water below. The river had been a part of the Kuchiki estate for as long as he could remember, dammed and paved with glistening multicolored stones many decades before he was born. He couldn’t imagine living here without the soothing sound of its flow, without the walls of the estate rising around him, the most decadent luxuries available at his fingertips and the shuffle of servants responding to his every beck and call. He had money, influence, and power, more than most people in Soul Society could dream of.

And he’d wasted it.

It would have taken no effort at all to dispatch searchers into the Rukongai in those days after the fire. Yes, the area outside of the Seireitei was enormous, but the Kuchiki’s resources were bottomless. All he would have had to do was tell them  _ the boy with hair like flame _ , and they would have found him. He could have saved a soul then, not just sent it on. He could have made a difference.

Instead, he pushed the boy from his mind and focused on his studies. He got better, smarter, deadlier. And it wasn’t until he was reviewing applications for the Sixth Division’s open lieutenancy decades later that he came across a familiar face, watching him with that same bored, evaluative look from the grainy photograph that accompanied the form. Taller, yes, with skin weathered by time and stress and tattoos along his forehead, but the same red hair, the same face edged in defiance and strength. Abarai Renji.

Of course, now Byakuya knew it wasn’t the first time he’d met Renji since the fire. But when the tall adolescent had burst through the Academy doors, shouting something about wanting to tell Rukia good news, Byakuya hadn’t even acknowledged him then, not out of malice but because his entire being was still numbed over with grief. When he came across Renji’s lieutenant application, it had been like believing someone long dead, and suddenly running into him on the street.

He had approved the application without thought, which turned out to be the best decision he had ever made. And yet.

And yet he’d  _ failed _ . He had almost killed Renji once—and the memory of that still sent cold shudders down his spine—and before that, he’d done even worse: he’d forgotten him. He had left Renji to fend for himself, an orphan in one of the harshest, most unforgiving areas of Soul Society, to scrabble for survival and to witness things that even these days Renji refused to talk about, horrible dark things that made shutters come down behind his eyes and required all of Byakuya’s soft words and softer touches to bring out a smile again. Some people looked at Renji now and thought him strong, heroic even, for having conquered Inuzuri and risen to his position as lieutenant of the Sixth. But what of Byakuya, who had sent him there in the first place, and then walked away without a second thought?

How could he even look at Renji now, knowing the sin he’d committed against him?

The soft touch to his wrist startled him out of the boiling anger. He turned to see Renji standing next to him, robe loose and hair still a little disheveled. His partner flicked a curious look down at his hand and Byakuya abruptly realized he’d clenched it into a shaking fist. Little pinpricks of pain shot up as he uncurled his fingers where his nails had bitten into his palm.

Rather than asking, Renji leaned back against the railing of the bridge, maintaining, as always, a respectable six inches of distance between them. Though their relationship was no secret and he displayed physical affection behind closed doors that would have made an octopus envious, Renji was always careful to respect his boundaries when they were out in public, not because he liked to but because he knew Byakuya preferred it. It was just another of the myriad ways his partner astounded him with the depth of his caring.

“You’re up early,” Renji said then, glancing up to where the sky above was just beginning to lighten into pink.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Mm-hm.” Renji’s response was an acknowledgment and a question all in one. Byakuya sighed, peering down at his reflection in the river.

“Do you think…” He paused, took a moment to gather his thoughts. Renji waited, ever patient. “If you’d been born into nobility, and raised the same as I. Where do you think you would be now?”

Renji tilted his head. “You asking if I’d change anything about my life if I got a do-over?”

Of course that was exactly what Byakuya was asking. At his nod, Renji shifted a bit and crossed his arms, thoughtful. The movement pushed up the sleeve of his robe, but there were no bruises there, not anymore.

“I dunno,” he said at last. “I mean, I guess the right answer’s yes. Who the fuck wants to go through what me and Rukia had to go through as kids? There was a lot of shit. Like, a  _ lot _ .”

Byakuya turned then, already preparing to reach out in case Renji tripped down the rabbit hole of awful memories, but his partner just shook his head. “But the thing is, there were good parts too. Not a lot, but they were there. And I learned a bunch from it. A lot of it was the stuff that made me who I am today.”

He shrugged. “Do I sometimes think about what it might’ve been like if things had been different? Sure I do. I think about growing up a noble, but I also think about what if I’d become a whore or a gangster or one of those weird-dressed superheroes in those comic books Ichigo likes. Doesn’t mean I actually want it.”

Byakuya blinked. “So…you think you would have been different?”

“Dunno.” Renji turned then to face him, and Byakuya saw it once more: that flash of flint, the promise of fire. “Maybe, maybe not, but the truth is I don’t care. Inuzuri was shitty but it made me who I am. And unless I’ve been getting things  _ majorly _ wrong this whole time, it’s me you fell in love with, not all the possible mes that might have happened at some point in the past.”

He reached up then, just a quick brush of fingers through Byakuya’s hair as he smiled. “You give me the option to start over, and tell me you’re what I get in the end? I’d do it all over again.”

He moved to draw his hand back but Byakuya grasped it. He ran his fingers over the callouses decorating Renji’s skin and swallowed hard. How was it possible that he’d found someone like this? Why had the gods chosen him, of all people, for the greatest of their gifts?

Renji made a soft noise of surprise when Byakuya stepped forward but he moved to make room, an arm winding comfortably around Byakuya’s waist as he surrounded them both with his scent. Byakuya pressed his nose to Renji’s neck and just breathed for a moment. Warm fingers stroked his spine, and Renji’s next words rumbled up through his chest, safe and echoing of home. “So, wanna enlighten me on what got you in such a weird mood?”

Byakuya smiled and allowed the last of the guilt and hesitation to disperse to the air, wiped clean as the sun finally rose, painting the world in warm light.

“I have something to tell you,” he whispered.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Regarding translations:** All my works, including this one, can be translated without first asking my express permission. I ask only that you credit me as the original author and provide a link back to the original work. For anything other than translations, please ask first. Thanks.


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